Posts Tagged With: tenth doctor

I mean, I made this one weeks ago, the last time it happened, but it seems fairly topical right now.

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Theresa May. She inherited an absolute dog’s breakfast, a situation that no one was going to be able to resolve because the concept of government in this country (and, indeed, in many democracies) is far more about the acquisition of power than it is about getting things done. No one had a clue how to pull out of the EU, and from what I can see we still don’t. And as Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I got to say about that.”

Talking of Brexit:

You will have your own suggestions: please leave them in the usual place.

Brexit is having an effect on the economy, of course, with yet another great British retailer headed firmly down the tubes.

Actually I haven’t been in an HMV for years – well, specifically the last time I was in London alone, which would be for the ‘Twice Upon A Time’ press screening back in December 2017. I’d tried unsuccessfully to buy my mother gloves (no suitable gloves – in Oxford Street!) and wandered in; I’d been briefly tempted by a bobble-headed John Hurt, but in the end had left empty-handed. The unfortunate truth is that I don’t really like the place very much. It’s expensive, unless you’re multi-buying, which is what I used to do – come away with five CDs for £30, or two or £15 if it was the newer stuff – and they would sit on my shelves and never get played, another contribution to the great accumulation of stuff. Just before Christmas we had a big clearout of stuff, and the local charity shops were seeing me almost daily. I feel as good about it as I did a year back when I got rid of all my Doctor Who DVDs. (They’re still here digitally, of course, but hard drives are much easier to store.)

I once passed out in the Reading branch of HMV; did I ever tell you that? It was a hot summer’s day over two decades ago, and I was temping at the civil service, earning a little cash to see me through university. I’d while away the lunch breaks wandering the shops and would often find myself casually re-filing all the CDs that punters had left in the wrong places, only to have other customers assume that I worked there – at least that’s what I assumed, seeing as they were asking me to direct them to the Classical section. On this one particular Tuesday I dropped off in a dead faint not far from the video section and awoke as I was being shepherded down the escalator by two paramedics. I spent the afternoon in hospital. The next day I was back, moving Bob Dylan back to the D’s.

Moving on to other matters, there’s been drama over at Sandringham this week.

I was in an Oxford leisure centre yesterday when I overheard two elderly gentlemen remarking that “Young people have accidents too” – a sentiment I would not in any way disagree with. The remarkable thing about this was that I had genuinely forgotten that Prince Philip is standing there with his TV doppelganger, although Smith only plays him in the first two series, with Tobias Menzies taking over for series 3. The question of who they’ll get to play him in later series, as the televised queen approaches middle age, is still open to debate. Timothy Dalton, perhaps?

Right: after that brief hiatus while I rambled around the Yorkshire moors (we may come back to that another time) it’s back to business as usual this week with our regular instalment of VERY IMPORTANT CLUES AND SIGNS.

What do we mean by this, precisely, dear uninitiated reader? Yes, you. The one who just joined the Facebook group this week and randomly clicked the link button because you thought you might get spoiler information. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Because we’ve been all through ‘Arachnids in the UK’ and combed it with the same meticulous dedication – not to mention the same grizzled expression – adopted by my wife when she’s delousing our children’s hair. As I’ve demonstrated in here on countless occasions, absolutely NOTHING in this show is an accident – and absolutely everything can mean something VITALLY SIGNIFICANT that we’re going to come back to later in the series. It’s simply a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff – an unseemly task at the best of times, so it’s lucky you’ve got me to do that for you. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride through Conspiracy Central, so I hope no one’s just eaten.

(As an aside, Emily suggested on Sunday evening that they should do an episode of Doctor Who with giant head lice. Who’s up for Rob Brydon as a cantankerous exterminator?)

We start at the beginning, or near enough.

This, you’ll remember, is the charming scene that sees the Doctor drop off her companions in one of the nicer parts of Sheffield, just before Yaz invites her up for a little something. At the moment I grabbed this frame, Whittaker is just about to slope forlornly off into the TARDIS, presumably to nab a custard cream and have a good cry into her Joanna Trollope. But look very carefully at the exact position they’ve left the camera. The partial obscuring of the door sign isn’t an accident – oh no indeed. It’s been left that way deliberately so that the visible letters form a particular set of words – at least they do once you’ve rearranged them, which is what I did. They spell:

MEDIATE SCAR STANCE

ABLE CENTURION PLYS LOOPHOLE

This ought to serve as a CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT INDICATION of two incredibly exciting crossover events: one involving Harry Potter, and one involving Legends of Tomorrow, specifically Arthur Darvill’s time travelling anti-hero Rip Hunter. Whether or not he’ll actually be dressed in the centurion outfit Rory wore is still very much on the table, but my guess is they’ll put it in as an Easter Egg. That’s what I’d do.

Fruit is next.

There are eight items of fruit in that bowl: five lemons and three limes. The use of bananas in the Whoniverse is, of course, common knowledge, whether it’s the Tenth Doctor waving one at the clockwork robots, Matt Smith whipping away River’s gun and replacing it with something equally phallic, or John Hurt eating several bananas on the trot in Krapp’s Last Tape. Lemons are somewhat harder to place, although one notes that the Tenth Doctor knows of a planet with highly evolved, humanoid lemons, perhaps in the manner of this chap.

However, the limes are a little less abstract. They pertain to three specific objects:

Miss Lime from ‘Zagreus’

The Limehouse in ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’

Lime Grove Studios

From this we can unambiguously conclude that a future series of Doctor Who will be featuring a special LIVE EPISODE filmed on the housing estate formerly occupied by Lime Grove, directed by Waris Hussein. The episode will feature Charley Pollard, coming face to mask with Magnus Greel. We know this from looking at the chair, which is positioned so that the slats mask the notes G-F-A-C-E on the piano. As I said: there is no such thing as coincidence.

(As an aside, have you seen Waris Hussein lately? He looks incredible. Somewhere in an Ealing attic there is a portrait covered in wrinkles.)

We’ll be back with more important observations, right after a visit to the bathroom.

You will note the three bottles of bath cream sat at the top of the screen. You will also note the mobile phone that is parallel with the third. In order to unpack this it is necessary to take a brief dive into history: namely 1973, the year the mobile phone was first unveiled to an unsuspecting world by Motorola’s Martin Cooper. Also of note: the left bottle is silvery-white, the second is darker. The third is the first in the sequence to escape the drab world of monochrome, assuming a tasteful blue appearance.

Thus we have one silver-haired Doctor, one with darker hair, and the first to appear in colour – and they’re grouped together in 1973, as denoted by the phone. The same year that ‘The Three Doctors’ was broadcast – although it began its initial transmission just before Christmas 1972. Coincidence? Of course not. You know me too well by now, surely?

But there’s more. You will also note that the cobweb-encrusted hand in the lower left portion of the shot is wearing a wedding ring: an object of great significance to the Doctor, as you’ll recall from the closing scenes of ‘Twice Upon A Time’. It’s a ring that signifies River Song. And if you count subsequent Doctors from those fingers, moving from the left (so as to make the whole thing clockwise) and starting with the Fourth, you’ll note that the ring finger is married (pun semi-intended) with Colin Baker, who travelled with River in The Eye of the Storm (in which they encountered Daniel Defoe) and World Enough and Time. Both were released on Christmas Day 2016, marking forty four years since ‘The Three Doctors’ – a number which CLEARLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY refers to the Type 44 TARDIS that the Doctor encounters in Harvest of Time. That’s the Third Doctor, folks, in case you were having trouble keeping up. You know, the one marked by the phone? Is it finally time for Sean Bean to step into the shoes of his father for another River Song series?

I mean, you read it here first, and we’ll keep you all updated as and when we have further news – but Christmas has even more significance for us today, and in order to understand why we really must move on and look at this map. I love a map. They’re layered with detail, and this one is no exception.

This is, as far as I can see, an actual map of Sheffield, because it tallies with the motorway junctions – more on that in a moment. In the episode, the Doctor grabs a thick black marker and swiftly draws an intricate fractal pattern that centres the action on a posh hotel that’s actually just outside Newport. Myself, I’d rather get the highlighters out. Because a curious thing happens when you join the dots using the right colours.

Still not with me? How about we do a little colouring in? (Please excuse the blots in this next one; my hand slipped.)

Viewed in this way, the seemingly random pattern of dots CLEARLY becomes a red-finned rocket-fish hybrid, blasting off for parts unknown – specifically to the North West, indicating that the TARDIS will be landing in Scotland next year. Could we be about to see a sequel to ‘The Eaters of Light’ that ties in with the star whale from ‘The Beast Below’? Watch this space, folks. Oh, and pardon the pun.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed something else: the blue line that protrudes from the ‘eye’ in the middle of the rocket-fish-whale-hybrid. The line is angled in the direction of junction 34 at the nearby M1, just north-west of Sheffield. Right next to this junction is a large green space (and golf club) named Concord Park, which neatly calls to mind ‘Time Flight’, in which Fifth Doctor Peter Davison travelled on Concorde – not to mention the rocket’s OBVIOUS AND ENTIRELY DELIBERATE resemblance to Mr Spoon’s rocket from Button Moon – a programme to which Davison voiced the theme music.

However, Davison is only the link here, and not the end product: we must examine his life within the context of Christmas, as I mentioned above. And Davison’s 1984 Christmas was one of particular upheaval, because it saw the arrival of his daughter, Georgia Moffett – who went on to marry David Tennant, and who was born (you guessed it) on December 25th.

Anyone want to guess how old David Tennant actually was when he made his debut in ‘Parting of the Ways’? That’s right, folks. Thirty-four. I swear, sometimes I surprise even myself.

Hello again. The catch-up session showcasing the most average Doctor Who material on the internet continues in earnest this morning – with four videos, all done over the course of a single month. This is unprecedented but they’re all fairly short and I was on a roll. And if you missed part one, you can find it here.

Right, where were we?

5. The Badger Song

The Badger Song is older than YouTube. I will let that sink in for a moment.

It hails from the days when Flash was cheap and easy to stream (and this is the moment some smart alec shows up in the comments and tell me it was animated with a different package). There’s something lovably silly about it; this fusion of badgers and fungi and SNAAAAAKES, a novelty record that is so thoroughly pointless that its lack of purpose itself becomes the point. The song turned fifteen at the beginning of September, so for obvious reasons I married it with footage from ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, ‘The Green Death’, ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’ – but first and foremost from ‘The Monster of Peladon’. MUSHROOM! MUSHROOM!

6. Day of the Doctor, Bonus Edition

Oh, Steven. What a can of worms you opened with this scene. It was a delicious, genuinely crowd-pleasing moment, but it makes no sense. I can accept that Capaldi turns up because the calculations weren’t quite done yet – but if that’s the case, how come Smith remembers the whole thing? Surely the persistence of memory is a luxury reserved solely for the oldest Doctor in residence? Or does it not count because there are several TARDIS doors and a few miles of space between them? And come to think of it, why is the First Doctor – whose control of his craft was so poor he could have shot for the moon from six feet away and missed – suddenly able to expertly pilot his TARDIS to precisely the right location at the exact moment he’s needed?

I wrote a little vignette over the summer that comes to explain – via extreme headcanon – precisely how the Twelfth Doctor came to be present in the skies over Gallifrey, but why on earth would you stop there? Because even if he’s the last, there are still a bunch of other Doctors you could use. Peter Cushing, for example, now that he’s supposedly canon. Or Rowan Atkinson. Or…well, I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say there were other incarnations I’d like to have shoehorned, but the lack of decent quality footage made it rather difficult. Needless to say I got some flak from this, largely from people who complained that it was anti-Whittaker. It categorically isn’t. But paranoia runs deep within the Whovian fandom; we live with it.

7. Ceiling Drop

Ha ha. Yes, we get it. It’s a glass ceiling and she’s broken it. Or somebody did. Either way it shatters, the fragments whirling and swirling around the new Doctor in a visually impressive, Matrix-style swoop. It’s not exactly subtle, and it does smack of troll-baiting, which may not be a bad thing (and certainly not something I’m about to condemn, seeing as it’s a hobby of mine). Whittaker glances through the fourth wall and mutters “Whoops”, which apparently gave her opponents all the ammunition they needed – “LOOK AT HER! SHE’S NOT A CARING DOCTOR!”. The rest of us rolled our eyes.

Several people pointed out that the ceiling is not unlike the one that Tennant fell through at the close of ‘The End of Time’ (supposedly Tredegar House in Newport, although having never watched Doctor Who Confidential I have no idea how they did that spaceship jump). I decided to splice them into a single sequence, kept deliberately short for the sake of not milking the joke. It just about hangs together, which is more than you can say for the ceiling.

8. There’s No Noddy

Believe it or not there is fan fiction about this scene. It features a flashback to the Eighth Doctor hanging out with Noddy and the other Toytown inhabitants. I think they were in a cave somewhere. Sadly there aren’t enough pictures of McGann’s Doctor on the internet and in any case no one does the deer-in-headlights look quite like Tennant, with the exception of Capaldi, and that doesn’t even make sense. I have thus pushed poor old Gareth Roberts’ amusing aside to breaking point, but the Photoshops were fun to do. You may be interested to learn that this little montage was playing in my head for years before I actually got round to making it, and it was always scored to ‘Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard’. So that’s what you can hear.

If you’re a regular reader here at the not-so-hallowed halls of Brian of Morbius, you will notice that one particular category has been somewhat neglected of late. The videos tab hasn’t seen any action in months. I used to do a separate blog entry for every video I created. Extensive notes on the genesis, making-of process and public reaction. Some of them ran to over a thousand words.

I don’t get time anymore. Part of it is actually having the time but having more worthwhile things to fill it with. I used to chip away at paragraphs when I was supposed to be working, during the quiet moments or the hours I simply couldn’t face doing that report. It was irresponsible and dishonest and it’s a miracle I didn’t get caught. These days I’ll vacuum the lounge. Well, when you have four kids and you had rice the previous evening, it’s the only way to stop things growing on the carpet.

The long and the short of it is that we’ve had a bunch of stuff appearing on YouTube over the last few months and most of it hasn’t even got a mention. If I were of a mind to do so, I’d give each video its own separate entry, the way I used to. But I have another book to start and in any case we’re about to get crazy with series 11. So a two-part digest – with a couple of paragraphs’ commentary for each video – is all you get, and will probably make for a better piece as a result.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy turned forty this year. We’re the same age, although we don’t share a birthday. Everyone has their own favourite iteration of Douglas Adams’ magnum opus, although no one likes the film very much; even two famous Bills (Nighy and Bailey) and the great Alan Rickman weren’t enough to save it from desperate mediocrity. But the TV series is still quite wonderful, as I found out when I watched it again recently with the kids. Joshua has this year finished the quintet and has even attempted to read And Another Thing, the Eoin Colfer-penned follow-up that nobody asked for and comparatively few people enjoyed.

Somewhere along the line I thought it would be fun to drop Eddie, the ship’s computer, into ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ as a replacement for House. I know I didn’t come up with the idea for this all by myself. It may or may not have been one of those group posts where I asked people for help, which is what happens when I get stuck. I genuinely can’t remember. Sadly the end result is a disaster. It’s clunky and disjointed and Eddie’s dialogue really doesn’t work; it feels enjambed, like the worst bits of Moffat’s dialogue. The bit where Amy is kneeling over Rory’s corpse and the computer is singing? Yeuch. Horrible. What the hell was I thinking? It’s worse than the Star Wars Holiday Special; I ought to pulp it from existence.

For the most part, backwards videos are a quick fix: they come about when I have a pressing need to do something but comparatively little time. You just run the score free dialogue track through semi-decent audio editing software and then sync it with the muted video, and then cut and paste as you see fit. You don’t even have to worry about copyright infringement, providing you’re using rights-free background music, and there’s plenty of that hanging around.

Every time I do a backwards video someone brings up the bloody Twin Peaks thing, and so on this occasion I set out to do something that was as David Lynch as…well all right, it’s not really David Lynch, but it’s a good deal more David Lynch than some of my other stuff. This isn’t an isolated scene, more a carefully arranged sequence (yes, sometimes there is actually some thought involved in these things) that spans the entire episode, from the opening Scooby Doo reference to Elton’s closing monologue. The end result is, I hope, a little bit spooky – or at least weird; weird is acceptable middle ground. I adore ‘Love And Monsters’, which gets trashed for all the wrong reasons, but various people who didn’t like it have cited this as an improvement, so I guess that’s a win.

3. May: Peppa Pig Still Can’t Whistle

We don’t watch Peppa Pig in our house. It’s not a protest or anything. We just can’t get Channel 5. In any case, iPlayer keeps everyone busy and I can do without accidentally running into the ridiculous travesty that is Thomas The Tank Engine. But even I couldn’t avoid this, which went all over BuzzFeed (no, I’m not linking; they don’t need the traffic) – the Peppa episode that has Peppa grousing that she can’t whistle, before hanging up on Suzie (who can) in spectacular style. The clip went viral, and the animated GIFs were used as a reaction for just about everything. My initial thoughts were to have Peppa call the Eleventh Doctor, but as it turns out this conversation with Donna (actually two, if you look carefully) from the 2008 Sontaran episodes fitted perfectly. Oink.

4. June: Fraggle Rock

This is exactly what it says on the tin. I hadn’t done an intro sequence for what felt like ages, and when someone posted the opening credits to Jim Henson’s 1980s classic on Facebook I noticed that an awful lot of it consisted of Gobo running down up and down corridors. Something clicked, and the rest was easy. Not to blow my own air horn too much, but I have to say I’m quite proud of this one.

For weeks we’ve been hanging about for new footage. Or images. It’s sort of exploded over the last forty-eight hours, an oasis in the desert. Until recently we had to work with what we had, which wasn’t much. First there was the hood-in-the-forest. Then the standing-on-a-hill. The smiling-through-the-cafe-window. The cloaked-magical-elf-with-wand. And now, the glass ceiling – that winsome smile to camera, accompanied by “Whoops”.

“WHAT SORT OF ATTITUDE IS THAT?” complained one fan. “IT’S LIKE SHE JUST DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THE SHOW OR SOMETHING.” There is only one response to this sort of thing, but it’s sadly unprintable.

Anyway. Doctors: Assemble.

I made the mistake of asking what the collective term for Whittakers might be, and more than one person replied “An Agenda of Whittakers”. Sigh.

But look, while we’re at it –

You will have your own. Leave them in the comments box, along with your collective hatred.

And then earlier this week we had that new wallpaper, which you’ll have seen by now, and which looks lovely, although it doesn’t feature nearly enough people standing around gazing in wonder and alarm.

It was my old friend Rachel who pointed out that there are patterns to this sort of thing. “I’ve never noticed before how many of the Doctor Who promo photos involve crouching,” she said. “I hope the Tardis does knee replacements.” She’s right. They look like they’re examining a corpse or something. “Scully. C’mere and take a look at this.”

And then there was the trailer, which featured a lot of running, and wide stares, and a cryptic farewell kiss blown across a white room, as the Doctor goes to what looks like her death. People have dedicated reams to its deconstruction and we don’t have time this morning – besides there is nothing new to add. I sort of liked it, I suppose. Could have done without the music, but there is a nice ensemble feel to the whole thing, the concept of family. It’s been a while since we’ve had that vibe in the TARDIS – 1967, really, although the Pertwee years came close.

But Doctor Who hasn’t been the only enduring British franchise graced with a new trailer this week: Mary Poppins Returns got one as well. We all know that Mary Poppins is a Time Lord, of course, given her love of hats, umbrellas, her ability to speak dog and the bag that’s bigger on the inside, but an exclusive leaked scene shows the connections run right through to the core.

Hurrah! It’s Mindfulness Day, folks, whatever that is. Supposedly it’s a day to promote mindfulness – the concept of being focused on the here and now and being mindful of what you’re doing, which is something that happens less these days than we’d like to hope it dows. Mindful eating, for example, is tasting every mouthful, concentrating on the food as it passes over the teeth and across the taste nerves and down the back of the throat as it is chewed and swallowed. Mindful breathing is tantamount to meditation. At my son’s school they do mindful reading, or as I call it, ‘reading’.

We’ve briefly discussed mindfulness before – last time was a nod to the Ladybird books, and I really ought to think about doing a part two for that at some point. Today we’re going to talk about genuine mindfulness, and thus I have assembled a selection of quotes and mantras and Advice For Living, from a variety of sources. And I’ve married them with images from Doctor Who. All entirely appropriate and not at all silly. Honest, guv.

Hey, you. Yes, you! You dozen or so new followers, all from Outlook.com addresses. Don’t think I can’t recognise a spam account when I see one. I’m watching you. One foot out of line and I’m going through the list, so watch yourselves.

I published a thing earlier this week that has caused a bit of a stir, and it looks like this:

The caption was ‘Exclusive first shot of the royal baby’.

Most people seemed amused and it went down quite well in all the Facebook groups I frequent – but there was one, in particular, where the knives came out in force.

“Disrespectful and offensive,” said one person, while an angst-ridden millennial described it as “a classless and distasteful attempt at satire”.

Satire? Satire?!? Look, it may be broad, and perhaps not terribly funny, but it’s certainly not satire. It’s just a throwback to ‘Delta and the Bannermen’. It’s not even a current photo, but rather one from a previous birth – it was up before we saw any pictures of the as-yet unnamed prince (my money’s on Edward, but we’ll see). I don’t know. There is a thing about fawning over the Royal Family, unless you’re a republican, in which case you consider them tax-dodging parasites (I used to, but it isn’t true, and it isn’t fair, and now I don’t). It’s particularly common on the other side of the pond, where there is unbridled adulation for the figurehead of a country they couldn’t wait to be rid of back in 1776; listen, she’s not your queen, and you’re pretty rude about Trump / Clinton / Obama (delete as applicable), so if you can have your fun, why can’t we? Or are some things more sacred than others?

“You’re in America,” I said. “Over here in Britain, ridiculing the Royal Family is par for the course.”

“No,” said a woman I will not name, except to say that she complains about everything, most notably the casting of Jodie Whittaker. “No, it isn’t.”

That’s not to say that all Americans are offended and all Brits are on board; we may have Spitting Image but there is a movement, particularly since the death of Diana, towards granting the monarchy a reverence it arguably does not deserve. The queen is human. So is Prince William. No human is untouchable, not even royalty. I find it ironic that in twenty years time when this no-longer-small child is out partying and Clarence House’s damage control department is working overtime to keep the press happy, it’ll be absolutely fine to take the piss, but having a little fun with a picture of a newborn in which the newborn isn’t even bloody visible is somehow out of order. Seriously, you’re offended by a Photoshopped alien? There’s not much I can do about that, but if that’s really the case, I fear you may have set the bar rather low.

It’s a busy page and a busy feed and so long as the comments continue to tail off (and I’m not locking them, out of general principle) this will happily fade into the background and be remembered as one of those things that many people laughed at and some people got upset over (one person even going so far as to leave the group, which is frankly overkill). Having said that there are occasional additions to the thread, like in those monster movies where they slaughter the entire host and then at the end the odd one keeps popping up with a “YAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!” and a whiff of fangs, only to be shot down by the one who got scared earlier in the film.

“Consider the possibility,” I was told this morning, “that since this has apparently offended a number of people, maybe it is offensive.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve considered it.”

Anyway: the other thing that happened this week was this piece I found in Metro about celebrities with shrunken heads. Some of them are really very good (the Bieber one, in particular, is wonderful) and I thought…well, why not have a go?

This week: as the recent series of The X-Files draws to a close, speculation mounts as to exactly what happened in ‘The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat’, and what it could possibly have to do with Doctor Who.

This week at Brian of Morbius, as news emerges of Elton John’s Grand Farewell Tour That’s Going To Take Three Years, an unexpected guest singalong at one of his concerts prompts concerns over cultural appropriation.

—

Elsewhere, proceedings at the Superbowl are interrupted by an unexpected pitch invasion.

—

An exclusive still emerges from a Doctor Who casting session that was mercifully denied the green light of approval.

A couple of years back we stopped off in a motorway services en route to a holiday at Butlins. I ordered coffee from Starbucks and, when the barista asked my name, requested ‘The Doctor’ and ‘Sarah Jane’.

To be honest, the absolute best thing to do in Starbucks is give your name as ‘Spartacus’, but I’ve never quite managed to be that brave. A knowing reference to the 70s, missed by the incredulous millennial who was serving me, would have to do. You take what you can get, although if it’s in Starbucks you rarely have change from a tenner. When I got outside Emily looked at the black scribble across the side of her cardboard container and raised an eyebrow.

“It was going to be ‘Romana’,” I admitted. “But I didn’t trust them to spell it properly.”

It’s a recurring theme. Emily is the voice of reason in my often hapless relationship with Doctor Who. What she lacks in experience she more than makes up for in common sense and general knowledge, and on top of this she’s usually right. I have a friend who has had to make a deal with his other half to keep their marriage intact: when they’re watching science fiction she is allowed four cynical remarks per episode “You know what it’s like,” he said to me.

“In our house, it’s the opposite,” I said. “I actively rely on Emily to beat on an episode that I was enjoying. It keeps me grounded. Besides, some of my best gags come from her.”

When I mentioned her in Facebook conversation the other week the question we received was “Which one’s the Doctor and which one’s the companion?”

“I’m the Doctor,” I said. “But she’s Romana. That should tell you all you need to know.”